Windows Developer Power Tools

10.13 Automating Web Application Testing with Selenium Core

Automating web-application testing is a difficult chore. Far too many applications have been poorly designed with business or program logic wrapped into the presentation layer, making it impossible to test these pieces of software via other tools such as NUnit. Besides, NUnit and other frameworks are unit-testing tools. How does a developer create automated acceptance tests to verify a system’s correct functionality?

Selenium can answer this question. Selenium is a testing tool that runs in a variety of browsers to drive web-application testing from the user interface. Selenium can be used to automate browser-compatibility testing and to automate functional testing.

Selenium at a Glance
Tool	Selenium
Version covered	0.7
Home page	http://www.openqa.org/selenium/
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/39
Summary	Automate web testing, including browser-compatibility and functionality tests
License type	Apache 2.0
Online resources	Forums, Wiki, bug tracker, documentation
Related tools in this book	Watir, FitNesse

Getting Started

Although Selenium depends on JavaScript and iframes to drive the automated testing, the tool officially supports a variety of platforms and browsers. The following browsers are officially supported on Windows:

• Internet Explorer 6

• Firefox 0.8 to 1.5

• Mozilla Suite 1.6+, 1.7+

• Seamonkey 1.0

• Opera 8, 9

The Selenium ...